A Series of Letters, in Defence of Divine Revelation: In Reply to Rev. Abner Kneeland's Serious Inquiry into the Authenticity of the Same. To Which is Added, a Religious Correspondence, Between the Rev. Hosea Ballou, and the Rev. Dr. Joseph Buckminster and Rev. Joseph Walton, Pastors of Congregational Churches in Portsmouth, N. H.Ballou, Hosea
Religion
A Series of Letters, in Defence of Divine Revelation: In Reply to Rev. Abner Kneeland's Serious Inquiry into the Authenticity of the Same. To Which is Added, a Religious Correspondence, Between the Rev. Hosea Ballou, and the Rev. Dr. Joseph Buckminster and Rev. Joseph Walton, Pastors of Congregational Churches in Portsmouth, N. H.
Ballou, Hosea
Revelation; Universalism -- Doctrines
With this reflection, I come to notice your remarks on the subject of
St. Paul's conversion; for it appears to me that you have allowed
certain facts without assigning any adequate causes by which those
facts came to exist. You make no attempt to deny that there was such a
man as St. Paul, nor do you deny his having been educated, and
religiously instructed as the scripture history concerning this man
sets forth. But you assign no reason why he became a believer in Jesus
Christ, you assign no reason for his becoming a preacher of the
doctrine of Jesus, you assign no reason why he should so patiently
suffer for the religion, the truth of which you are now calling in
question. You allow that before his conversion he persecuted unto
death the "weak and defenceless disciples of the meek and lowly
Jesus." But you assign no reasons why weak and defenceless men should
become the disciples of Jesus. You would fain insinuate that what he
relates of the particular circumstance which happened to him on his
way to Damascus was a mere reverie. But you make no attempt to show
how such a reverie could produce in this learned pharisee a belief
that Jesus, who was crucified had actually arose from the dead, when
there were not even the shadow of evidence existing to prove such an
improbable fact. You are inclined to this notion of a reverie on
account of some experience of your own, which your good sense and
after reflection have discovered to be nothing on which dependence
ought to be placed. Sir, where is the similarity of your case with
that of the learned pharisee? Do you really believe you ever
experienced a reverie, that would go in the least to cause you to
believe in the resurrection of a man who was hanged in your sight, and
who you knew was buried, and of whose resurrection you had no
evidence, only a vague reverie? Do you believe you ever experienced a
mere imagination which was strong enough to produce the above belief,
and which could continue to influence you all your life long, lead you
to forsake a most honourable connexion, and to espouse a religion
which all the prejudices of your education opposed, and to labour
continually for its support and to suffer every thing for its defence?
No, you pretend to no such thing, therefore your case is very
different from St. Paul's.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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